Twenty-five years chasing a number I couldn't own.Most of B2B marketing still is.
All of it was in B2B technology, and much of it in names you'll know. In some I ran the whole marketing function. In others I ran part of it, or worked in it.
IBM and Sun Microsystems early on, then Manhattan Associates, Intermec, AVEVA, GreyOrange and Agilysys.
In every one I did what the profession said to do. I moved marketing closer to the money. Awareness, then leads, then qualified leads, then pipeline, then influenced revenue. Every step felt like progress.
It never occurred to me to ask who already owned the number I was walking towards.
Sales did. Sales always did.
What I actually do
Every B2B technology business I've worked in had the same blind spot in its marketing. Not a lack of effort or talent. Just a question nobody could answer: whether the money came back.
Marketing spent years trying to prove it was worth what it cost. The number it reached for was revenue, which sales already owned. So every claim it made arrived already discounted.
Unable to show a return, it gets treated as a cost. Managed as a budget. Cut first when things get tight.
Under that pressure, B2B marketing leaders last in the job less time than almost anyone at their level, and the relationship with finance is one of the weakest in the business. BCG found only seven per cent of companies could say who was accountable for what marketing returns.
The response has been to measure more. More tools, more dashboards, more attribution models. None of it answers the question finance is asking.
And underneath it all, most B2B marketers were never taught the commercial side of their own discipline. Mark Ritson and Ipsos found fewer than one in three could answer ten basic questions about it.
Each of those feeds the next, and from inside the loop nobody can see the whole of it.
Marketing has spent twenty years trying to buy credibility with attribution models. I help it earn it instead, by showing whether its spending creates capital or destroys it, and then changing the answer.
Sometimes I do that for a business directly. Sometimes I do it alongside the marketer, so they can do it themselves. And several times a year I teach it, so any marketer can.
Mark Ritson's Mini MBA in Marketing. Mark Ritson's Mini MBA in Brand Management. IBM Sales School, which taught me more about how businesses buy than anything with the word marketing in the title.
Recommendations to follow, published with permission.